I Labdacidi sulla scena portoghese: due drammi di Armando Nascimento Rosa

Abstract

In the 21^st century, the already substantial corpus of Portuguese plays inspired by the Theban myth has been increased by two works by Armando Nascimento Rosa, which strike for both their originality and their virtuosity: Um Édipo – O drama ocultado, mitodrama fantasmático em um acto (An Oedipus – The untold story. A ghostly mythodrama in one act), 2002-2006, printed in 2012, and Antígona Gelada (Frozen Antigone), 2008. These plays do not form a dilogy, at least in a consistent way, since their contents are factually incompatible; they instead substantiate two points of view about the Labdacides myth, in the former case by giving prominence to the underlying subject matter of homosexuality (the ‘early sin’ of Laius and its consequences); in the latter, by transposing the traditional story to a dystopian space station with its technocratic society. Beyond the dramaturgical differences, these texts testify to the hermeneutic research of Rosa and his mythopoetic flair, nourished by the classics and by the lesson of masters like S. Freud, C. G. Jung, and J. Hillman.